Last week Erik bring us to the issues about Interactive designer and the relationship of material, tools, and designer as a three requirement of digital artifact.
I always think about the designer as the most energetic component in process of design, designer has to know the material and tools well-include knowing drawbacks, merit.
Designer need to take vantage of merit, and extend the strength it naturally possessed, sometimes even drawback can be took advantage of . There is well-known story about making cloisonne in China, saying that an unexpected incident of broking the raw material leading to a beautiful artifact and a new approach to shape the decorative surface design.
I think too design has a set of theory, people generalize the real processes of design as set of theory, we use it to product stuff. We stick to this theory to product thousands of times, and then we realize in some context the theory is not quite fit. We conclude the constraints and strong points of the theory and then we know how to improve the theory in new circumstance. Tiger Woods can use 2 golf clubs beat Laura Brunetti who has as many of best clubs in the world, because Tiger knows the secret of when and how to hit the ball accurately with appropriate power. He knows the limitation of clubs and try to jump out of these limitations. The abilities of how to deal with tools and material constitute of skills.
I always want to describe skill as water, the flexible fluid without fixed shape. In a bottle, it is the shape of a bottle, in a fish tank, it fit There is a scene at the end of film the Matrix, Neo see the whole visual world- the room, the agent Smith as lines of parallel e binary codes.
By the way, designer shapes the artifact, how design shapes the designer, to be philosopher?